Casebook On European Fair Trial Standards In Administrative Justice

Interest in administrative justice and the judicial review of administrative acts has been growing in many countries recently, including many Council of Europe member states. At the core of an accountable and transparent administration is the right to effectively challenge acts and decisions that affect civil rights and obligations, and the daily life of individuals. Effective means of redress against administrative decisions require a functioning system of administrative justice that provides fair trial guarantees. An administrative process should be public, held within a reasonable time, undertaken by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law and result in an enforceable judgment that is pronounced publicly. This casebook, the first of its kind, provides a systematic and accessible overview of what administrative justice means for Council of Europe member states. The case law of the European Court of Human Rights on the right to a fair trial is described and analysed as it relates to administrative proceedings. It is the hope of the Council of Europe and the Folke Bernadotte Academy that this casebook will help practitioners in the field of administrative justice to ensure fair trial standards and their principles applicable under Article 6, paragraph 1, of the European Convention on Human Rights are respected and, by doing so, further strengthen the rule of law and the accountability and transparency of public administration and administrative justice in the member states of the Council of Europe.

This book seeks to find an answer to the question of how to rule a state well by drawing on a range of organizational, procedural, and substantive standards of administrative conduct developed within the framework of the Council of Europe (CoE) as an organization of a broader scope than the European Union.

This book is about judicial review of public administration. Many have regarded this to divide European legal orders, with judicial review of administrative action in the general courts or specialized administrative courts, or with different distance from the executive. There has been considerably less of comparison of the basic procedural and substantive principles. The comparative study in this book of procedural fairness and propriety in the courts reveals not only differences but also some common and connecting elements, in a 'common core' perspective. The book is divided into four parts. The first explains the nature and purpose of a comparison to understand the relevance and significance of commonality and diversity between the legal systems of Europe, and which considers other legal systems which are distant and distinct from Europe, such as China and Latin America. The second part contains an overview of the systems of judicial review in these legal orders. The third part, which is the heart of the 'common core' method, contains both a set of hypothetical cases and the solutions, according to the experts of the legal systems selected for our comparison, to the cases. The fourth part serves to examine the answers in comparative terms to ascertain not so much whether a 'common core' exists, but how it is shaped and evolves, also in response to the influence of supranational legal orders as the European Union and the Council of Europe.

The Oxford ILDC online database, an online collection of domestic court decisions which apply international law, has been providing scholars with insights for many years. This ILDC Casebook is the perfect companion, introducing key court decisions with brief introductory and connecting texts. An ideal text for practitioners, judged, government officials, as well as for students on international law courses, the ILDC Casebook explains the theories and doctrines underlying the use by domestic courts of international law, and illustrates the key importance of domestic courts in the development of international law.

While the EU agencies that have been granted the power to adopt binding decisions are a diverse group, they at least share one feature: in all of them an organisationally separate administrative review body, i.e. a board of appeal, has been established. The review procedures before these boards must be exhausted before private parties can seize the EU courts and the boards therefore all fulfil a similar function: filtering cases before they end up before the courts and providing parties by expert-driven review. Sharing this common function as well as some common features, the boards of appeal of the different agencies remain heterogenous in their set up and functioning. This raises a host of questions from both a theoretic and practical perspective which this volume analyses in depth: how do the boards function, which kind of review do they offer, and how should they be conceptualized in the EU's overall system of legal protection against administrative action? To answer these questions, the volume's first part presents a series of case studies, covering all the EU boards of appeal currently in existence, while a second part looks into the horizontal issues raised by the phenomenon of the boards of appeal.

The public administration is above all for us, the protection of our rights and the pursuit of the public good. This handbook will be of interest to all those concerned with the proper functioning of public administration: individuals who apply for public services and action and the public officials who process their applications; lawyers, judges and ombudspersons involved in the review of the public administration’s activities; and policy makers and legislators concerned with public administration reform. It sets out and explains the substantive and procedural principles of administrative law concerning relations between individuals and public authorities, with commentary backed up by references to the Council of Europe legal instruments (conventions, recommendations and resolutions) from which each principle is drawn and to the relevant case law of the European Court of Human Rights.

In this thoroughly updated second edition of what has quickly become the definitive text in the field of international humanitarian law (IHL), leading expert Marco Sassòli evaluates the application of IHL, the way in which hostilities should be conducted against an adversary, and the pertinence of traditional distinctions, such as that between international and non-international armed conflicts.